Bone Gap, Laura Ruby (Balzer & Bray)
Nimona, Noelle Stevenson (HarperTeen)
NEBULA AWARD NOMINEE
BEST SHORT STORY
MADELEINE
AMAL EL~MOHTAR
Amal El-Mohtar has received the Locus Award, been a finalist for the Nebula, Aurora, and World Fantasy awards, and won the Rhysling Award for poetry three times. She is the author of The Honey Month, a collection of poetry and prose written to the taste of twenty-eight different kinds of honey, and contributes criticism to NPR Books and the LA Times. Her fiction has most recently appeared in Lightspeed, Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, and in The Starlit Wood anthology from Saga Press. She divides her time and heart between Ottawa and Glasgow. Find her online at amalelmohtar.com, or on Twitter @tithenai.
FROM THE AUTHOR
I’d been playing with the idea of sense-based time-travel for a couple of years—I wanted to write about a young woman who, when she heard a certain song or smelled a certain smell, would literally travel back in time to the first moment she experienced those things. The plot would kick out of the fact that when she goes back in time via her memories, she starts seeing someone unfamiliar in them, someone who shouldn’t be there. The more I thought about it, though, the more the philosophical constraints of a time-travel story—determinism! grand-father paradoxes! mutable timelines!—seemed too mechanical and aslant the story I actually wanted to tell: a story about how we live with memory, its fading and resurgence, how we’re made of memories, and what precisely we’re giving when we share them.
Fast-forward to Seanan McQuire inviting me to write for Lightspeed’s “Queers Destroy Science Fiction” issue, and I figured this was the story I wanted to write for her. Some grace notes in the story are specifically for her—the cinnamon in the chicken soup, in particular—and I remain profoundly grateful for her reaching out and trusting me even as I tumbled past deadline after deadline in search of the story’s final form.
An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me. . . . Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? . . . And suddenly the memory revealed itself.
—Marcel Proust
Madeleine remembers being a different person.
It strikes her when she’s driving, threading through farmland, homesteads, facing down the mountains around which the road winds. She remembers being thrilled at the thought of travel, of the self she would discover over the hills and far away. She remembers laughing with friends, looking forward to things, to a future.
She wonders at how change comes in like a thief in the night, dismantling our sense of self one bolt and screw at a time until all that’s left of the person we think we are is a broken door hanging off a rusty hinge, waiting for us to walk through.
* * *
“Tell me about your mother,” says Clarice, the clinical psychologist assigned to her.
Madeleine is stymied. She stammers. This is only her third meeting with Clarice. She looks at her hands and the tissue she twists between them. “I thought we were going to talk about the episodes.”
“We will,” and Clarice is all gentleness, all calm, “but—”
“I would really rather talk about the episodes.”
Clarice relents, nods in her gracious, patient way, and makes a note. “When was your last one?”
“Last night.” Madeleine swallows, hard, remembering.
“And what was the trigger?”
“The soup,” she says, and she means to laugh, but it comes out wet and strangled like a sob. “I was making chicken soup, and I put a stick of cinnamon in. I’d never done that before but I remembered how it looked, sometimes, when my mother would make it—she would boil the thighs whole with bay leaves, black pepper, and sticks of cinnamon—so I thought I would try. It was exactly right—it smelled exactly, exactly like hers—and then I was there, I was small and looking up at her in our old house, and she was stirring the soup and smiling down at me, and the smell was like a cloud all around, and I could smell her, too, the hand cream she used, and see the edge of the stove and the oven door handle with the cat-print dish towel on it—”
“Did your mother like to cook?”
Madeleine stares.
“Madeleine,” says Clarice, with the inevitably Anglo pronunciation Madeleine has resigned herself to, “if we’re going to work together to help you I need to know more about her.”
“The episodes aren’t about her,” says Madeleine, stiffly. “They’re because of the drug.”
“Yes, but—”
“They’re because of the drug, and I don’t need you to tell me I took part in the trial because of her—obviously I did—and I don’t want to tell you about her. This isn’t about my mourning, and I thought we established these aren’t traumatic flashbacks. It’s about the drug.”
“Madeleine,” and Madeleine is fascinated by Clarice’s capacity to both disgust and soothe her with sheer unflappability, “Drugs do not operate—or misfire—in a vacuum. You were one of sixty people participating in that trial. Of those sixty, you’re the only one who has come forward experiencing these episodes.” Clarice leans forward, slightly. “We’ve also spoken about your tendency to see our relationship as adversarial. Please remember that it isn’t. You,” and Clarice doesn’t smile, exactly, so much as that the lines around her mouth become suffused with sympathy, “haven’t even ever volunteered her name.”
Madeleine begins to feel like a recalcitrant child instead of an adult standing her ground. This only adds to her resentment.
“Her name was Sylvie,” she offers, finally. “She loved being in the kitchen. She loved making big fancy meals. But she hated having people over. My dad used to tease her about that.”
Clarice nods, smiles her almost-smile, makes further notes. “And did you use the technique we discussed to dismiss the memory?”
Madeleine looks away. “Yes.”
“What did you choose this time?”
“Althusser.” She feels ridiculous. “‘In the battle that is philosophy all the techniques of war, including looting and camouflage, are permissible.’”
Clarice frowns as she writes, and Madeleine can’t tell if it’s because talk of war is adversarial or because she dislikes Althusser.
* * *
After she buried her mother, Madeleine looked for ways to bury herself.
She read non-fiction, as dense and theoretical as she could find, on any subject she felt she had a chance of understanding: economics, postmodernism, settler-colonialism. While reading Patrick Wolfe she found the phrase invasion is a structure not an event, and wondered if one could say the same of grief. Grief is an invasion and a structure and an event, she wrote, then struck it out, because it seemed meaningless.
Grief, thinks Madeleine now, is an invasion that climbs inside you and makes you grow a wool blanket from your skin, itchy and insulating, heavy and grey. It wraps and wraps and wraps around, putting layers of scratchy heat between you and the world, until no one wants to approach for fear of the prickle, and people stop asking how you are doing in the blanket, which is a relief, because all you want is to be hidden, out of sight. You can’t think of a time when you won’t be wrapped in the blanket, when you’ll be ready to face the people outside it—but one day, perhaps, you push through. And even though you’ve struggled against the belief that you’re a worthless colony of contagion that must be shunned at all costs, it still comes as a shock, when you emerge, that no one’s left waiting for you.
Worse still is the shock that you haven’t emerged at all.
* * *
“The thing is,” says Madeleine, slowly, “I didn’t use the sentence right away.”
“Oh?”
“I—wanted to see how long it could last, on its own.” Heat in her cheeks, knowing how this will sound, wanting both to resist and embrace it. “To ride it out. It kept going just as I remembered it—she brought me a little pink plastic bowl with yellow flowers on it, poured just a tiny bit of soup in, blew on it, gave it to me with a plastic spoon. There were little star-shaped noodles. I—” she feels tears in her eyes, hates this, hates crying in front of Clarice, “—I could have eaten it. It smelled so good, and I was hungry. But I got superstitious. You know.” She shrugs. “Like if I ate it I’d have to stay for good.”
“Did you want to stay for good?”
Madeleine says nothing. This is what she hates about Clarice, this demand that her feelings be spelled out into one thing or another: isn’t it obvious that she both wanted and didn’t want to? From what she said?
“I feel like the episodes are lasting longer,” says Madeleine, finally, trying to keep her voice level. “It used to be just a snap, there and back—I’d blink, I’d be in the memory, I’d realize what happened and it would be like a dream, I’d wake up, come back. I didn’t need sentences to help. But now . . .” She looks to Clarice to fill the silence, but Clarice waits, as usual, for Madeleine herself to articulate the fear.
“. . . Now I wonder if this is how it started for her. My mother. What it was like for her.” The tissue in her hands is damp, not from tears, but from the sweat of her palms. “If I just sped up the process.”
“You don’t have Alzheimer’s,” says Clarice, matter-of-fact. “You aren’t forgetting anything. Quite the opposite: you’re remembering so intensely and completely that your memories have the vividness and immediacy of hallucination.” She jots something down. “We’ll keep trying to dismantle the triggers as they arise. If the episodes seem to be lasting longer, it could be because they’re fewer and farther between. This is not necessarily a bad thing.”
Madeleine nods, chewing her lip, not meeting Clarice’s eyes.
* * *
So far as Madeleine is concerned her mother began dying five years earlier, when the fullness of her life began to fall away from her like chunks of wet cake: names; events; her child. Madeleine watched her mother weep, and this was the worst, because with every storm of grief over her confusion Madeleine couldn’t help but imagine the memories sloughing from her, as if the memories themselves were the source of her pain, and if she could just forget them and live a barer life, a life before the disease, before her husband’s death, before Madeleine, she could be happy again. If she could only shed the burden of the expectation of memory, she could be happy again.
Madeleine reads Walter Benjamin on time as image, time as accumulation, and thinks of layers and pearls. She thinks of her mother as a pearl dissolving in wine until only a grain of sand is left drowning at the bottom of the glass.
As her mother’s life fell away from her, so did Madeleine’s. She took a leave of absence from her job, and kept extending it; she stopped seeing her friends; her friends stopped seeing her. Madeleine is certain her friends expected her to be relieved when her mother died, and were surprised by the depth of her mourning. She didn’t know how to address that. She didn’t know how to say to those friends, you are relieved to no longer feel embarrassed around the subject, and expect me to sympathise with your relief, and to be normal again for your sake. So she said nothing.
Madeleine’s friends were not bad people; they had their own lives, their own concerns, their own comfort to nourish and nurture and keep safe, and dealing with a woman who was dealing with her mother who was dealing with early-onset Alzheimer’s proved a little too much, especially when Madeleine’s father had died of bowel cancer only a year earlier, especially when she had no other family. It was indecent, so much pain at once, it was unreasonable, and her friends were reasonable people. They had children, families, jobs, and Madeleine had none; she understood. She did not make demands.
She joined the clinical trial the way some people join fund-raising walks, and thinks now that that was her first mistake. People walk, run, bicycle to raise money for cures—that’s the way she ought to have done it, surely, not actually volunteered to be experimented on. No one sponsors people to stand still.
* * *
The episodes happen like this.
A song on the radio like an itch in her skull, a pebble rattling around inside until it finds the groove in which it fits, perfectly, and suddenly she’s—
—in California, dislocated, confused, a passenger herself now in her own head’s seat, watching the traffic crawl past in the opposite direction, the sun blazing above. On I-5, en route to Anaheim: she is listening, for the first time, to the album that song is from, and feels the beautiful self-sufficiency of having wanted a thing and purchased it, the bewildering freedom of going somewhere utterly new. And she remembers this moment of mellow thrill shrinking into abject terror at the sight of five lanes between her and the exit, and will she make it, won’t she, she doesn’t want to get lost on such enormous highways—
—and then she’s back, in a wholly different car, her body nine years older, the mountain, the farmland all where they should be, slamming hard on the brakes at an unexpected stop sign, breathing hard and counting all the ways in which she could have been killed.
Or she is walking in a world perched on the lip of spring, the Ottawa snow melting to release the sidewalks in fits and starts, peninsulas of gritty concrete wet and crunching beneath her boots, and that solidity of snowless ground meets the smell of water and the warmth of the sun and the sound of dripping and the world tilts—
—and she’s ten years old on the playground of her second primary school, kicking aside the pebbly grit to make a space for shooting marbles, kneeling to use her hands to smooth the surface, then wiping her palms on her corduroy trousers, then reaching into her bag of marbles for the speckled dinosaur-egg that is her lucky one, her favourite—
—and then she’s back, and someone’s asking if she’s okay, because she looked like she might be about to walk into traffic, was she drunk, was she high?
She has read about flashbacks, about PTSD, about reliving events, and has wondered if this is the same. It is not as she imagined those things. She has tried explaining this to Clarice, who very sensibly pointed out that she couldn’t both claim to have never experienced trauma-induced flashbacks and say with certainty that her episodes are categorically different. Clarice is certain, Madeleine realizes, that trauma is at the root of these episodes, that there’s something Madeleine isn’t telling her, that her mother, perhaps, abused her, that she had a terrible childhood.
None of these things are true.
Now: she is home, leaning her head against her living room window at twilight, and something in the thrill of that blue and the cold glass against her scalp sends her tumbling—
—into her body at fourteen, looking into the blue deepening above the tree line near her home as if into another country, longing for it, aware of the picture she makes as a young girl leaning her wondering head against a window while hungry for the future, for the distance, for the person she will grow to be—and starts to reach for a phrase only her future/present self knows, to untangle herself from her past head. She has just about settled on Kristeva—abjection is above all ambiguity—when she feels, strangely, a tug on her field of vision, something at its periphery demanding attention. She looks away from the sky, looks down, at the street she grew up on, the street she knows like the inside of her mouth.
She sees a girl about her own age, brown-skinned and dark-haired, grinning at her and waving.
She has never seen her before in her life.
* * *
Clarice, for once, looks excited—which is to say, slightly more intent than usual—which makes Madeleine uncomfortable. “Describe her as accurately as you can,” says Clarice.
“She looked about fourteen, had dark skin—”
Clarice blinks. Madeleine continues.
&n
bsp; “—and dark, thick hair, that was pulled up in two ponytails, and she was wearing a red dress and sandals.”
“And you’re certain you’d never seen her before?” Clarice adjusts her glasses.
“Positive.” Madeleine hesitates, doubting. “I mean, she looked sort of familiar, but not in a way I could place? But I grew up in a really white small town in Quebec. There were maybe five non-white kids in my whole school, and she wasn’t any of them. Also—” she hesitates, again, because, still, this feels so private, “—no part of an episode has ever felt unfamiliar.”
“She could be a repressed memory,” Clarice muses, “someone you’ve forgotten—or an avatar you’re making up. Perhaps you should try speaking to her.”
* * *
Clarice had suggested that Madeline could manage the episodes by corrupting the memory with something incompatible, something of-the-moment. Madeleine had settled on phrases from her recent reading: they were new enough to not be associated with other memories, and incongruous enough to remind her of her bereavement even in her mother’s presence. It seemed to work; she had never yet experienced the same memory twice after deploying her critics and philosophers.
It is very strange, now, to go in search of a memory instead.
She tries, again, with the window: waits until twilight, leans her head against the same place, but the temperature is wrong somehow, it doesn’t come together. She tries making chicken soup; nothing. Finally, feeling her way towards it, she heats a mug of milk in the microwave, stirs it to even out the heat, takes a sip—
—while holding the mug with both hands, sitting at the kitchen table, her legs dangling far above the ground. Her parents are in the kitchen, chatting—she knows she’ll have to go to bed soon, as soon as she finishes her milk—but she can see the darkness outside the living room windows, and she wants to know what’s out there. Carefully, trying not to draw her parents’ attention, she slips down from the chair and pads—her feet are bare, she is in her pajamas already—towards the window.
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